Return to the Essence of Text Editing

Indent Region or Buffer

Everyone who’s used Emacs for more than 10 minutes knows that you can
indent the selected region in a buffer with C-M-\ (bound to the
command indent-region). While this is pretty useful I find that it’s
more useful to have a command that indents the current region if
present and the entire buffer otherwise. Therefore I’ve devised the
simple commands indent-buffer and indent-region-or-buffer.

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(defunindent-buffer()"Indent the currently visited buffer."(interactive)(indent-region(point-min)(point-max)))(defunindent-region-or-buffer()"Indent a region if selected, otherwise the whole buffer."(interactive)(save-excursion(if(region-active-p)(progn(indent-region(region-beginning)(region-end))(message"Indented selected region."))(progn(indent-buffer)(message"Indented buffer.")))))

Now that you have indent-region-or-buffer you don’t actually need
indent-region or indent-buffer that much (if at all). That’s why I
typically bind indent-region-or-buffer to C-M-\.

1

(global-set-key(kbd"C-M-\\")'indent-region-or-buffer)

As usual both commands are available in
Prelude(but with prelude-
prefices).